NaNoWriMo, 2023 (Log 4)

In which I finally finished a long delayed WIP. Also, a Thanksgiving Special.

Author’s Note: Once again, the Substack editor told me that this post is ‘too long for e-mail’. Thus, I advise readers to read this directly on the website for best experience.

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First of all, Happy Thanksgiving! I honestly wasn’t intending any sort of Thanksgiving special at first. It’s just my weekly Thursday posting schedule for Germanicus Publishing.

And so, my adventures through the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) continues on as we’re finally hitting the home stretch.

Source

Here are my previous three logs:

NaNoWriMo, 2023 (Log 1)

NaNoWriMo, 2023 (Log 2)

NaNoWriMo, 2023 (Log 3)

Click on this link to see the whole section dedicated to my NaNoWriMo challenge.

What’s New

Still writing in the Land of Michael Jordan¹. In the previous log, I wrote about how I had finally reached a breakthrough for The Iniquity of the Federation, my work-in-progress (WIP) short story. That turned out to be true, though the work to complete that story was far from finished at that point.

I checked through my daily logs in Chat and saw that I finished this story 5 days after I posted last week’s log.

And as it turned out, finishing The Iniquity of the Federation ended up taking me ten days. I’m still not sure how I feel about my progress, but I’m sure glad that I’m finished with that particular story. Now I can move to the later parts of Project Holy League Universe 3.0.

Like I said in the beginning of my NaNoWriMo challenge, much of the legwork for this project had been done already. Thus, I expect my progress to speed up considerably from this point on.

Getting Distracted

The funny thing about this week for me was how many distractions just came my way. I’ve already said before about how I have a lot of personal things that may prevent me from focusing on Project Holy League Universe 3.0². But in addition to that, I started another Substack project. It was very impromptu and only happened because of something I put out on Substack Notes:

And out of the exchange that followed, came Bima Sakti, a collaborative project I’m doing with Scoot. Check out the Substack for more details.

I’ll be honest, this was how I’ve been doing this week:

My Progress

I’m not even sure why I even bother putting up the picture above. If you notice, I haven’t even won any badge since the last log. Not even the 14 days in a row one – probably because some days I forgot to update my word count.

I won’t lie, this project just felt like a drag sometimes. There were times where I would rather work on anything but this. That ranges from Bima Sakti to my tinkering around with how Germanicus Publishing looks³. I don’t regret doing all those things, but I do wonder if I had been engaging in a weird form of procrastination.

Another issue is that the Toledo virus is still sticking around. At this point, it’s just an annoying cough. But the fact that I’m still dealing with it after about three weeks just annoys me, to be honest.

I’m sorry if I’m coming across as complaining, because I’m not. I am a writer, after all. Not to sound pretentious about it, but I’ve already started this project, and that’s why I must see it through to the end. Even if I fail, at least I didn’t quit.

Be Thankful!

I hope I didn’t rub people the wrong way in complaining or humble bragging or whatever. I promise that wasn’t my intention.

Despite what I’ve been saying in this post, I am very thankful for what I have in my life. The obvious one is for my family and my personal life in general. But I am also thankful that I was able to finish The Iniquity of the Federation. It still looks really rough, but I’m hoping to eventually release that story as a three-part serial like The Americans Used to Go This Way.

I am also thankful for Substack. And no, this isn’t me kissing up the hand that feeds me⁴. In the last few weeks, I have been seeing various people criticizing⁵ the whole ‘Substack culture’⁶. To be honest, I found their criticisms to be well-placed, even if I don’t agree with them 100%. Thus, I’ve been rethinking my priorities. No, I’m not saying that I’m quitting Substack – not even close.

But wherever I go from here, Substack will always have a special place in my heart not just because they provided the platform for my writings but also because of all the people that I’ve met which include but not limited to:

Scoot

,

S.E. Reid

,

Joseph Wiess

,

Alexander Hellene

,

T.D. McIntosh

,

Redd Oscar

,

Erica Drayton

,

Alvin H

,

Sujan Sundareswaran

,

Stephen A. Davis

, and many others.

Once again, have a Happy Thanksgiving from Chicago⁷, Illinois.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

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Thanks for reading. If you like my novel-writing journey, check out a completed novel of mine, Inquisitor’s Promise:

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share this post and publication. Also, feel free to support my works. I appreciate every bit of support.

1. And I don’t mean North Carolina.

2. A bit vague on the details, I know.

3. I hope you noticed that one, dear reader.

4. Is that even a metaphor?

5. Counter-signaling might be a more accurate word to use, but whatever.

6. For lack of a better term.

7. Well, not quite Chicago but it rolls of the tongue better.